Wednesday, March 31
Before finishing Man With a Movie Camera we discussed briefly what students saw on Tuesday. What is the film about? (Possible answers: making and watching a movie, vision, the post-revolutionary Russian seeing themselves as a people, the workers seeing themselves as a revolutionary class, the filmmakers seeing themselves as revolutionary workers, etc.)
We also rewatched the beginning and one other section of the film with voiceover narration by film scholar Yuri Tsivian.


Tuesday, March 30
Mr. P was out; students watched the first 49 minutes of Dziga Vertov's Man With a Movie Camera.

Monday, March 29

Students turned in single-scene analysis essays and returned films.

To put the artistic style of Battleship Potemkin and Man With a Movie Camera (which students will view starting tomorrow) into their broader cultural context we looked at slides of Cubist (Duchamp and Picasso) and Futurist works, and, for the Russian context, examples of Constructivism (including Rodchenko and Tatlin). We concluded with some of the anti-Fascist photomontages of the German Communist John Heartfield.

Friday, March 26

Mr. P distributed two new handouts, "The Great Experiment," about cultural trends in post-revolutionary Russia, and a similar handout also containing information about about Dziga Vertov.

We completed our analysis of the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin and introduced Vertov and his differences with Eisenstein.

Thursday, March 25

Mr. P announced that he will accept the outside viewing essay, due tomorrow, for full credit on Monday and will give 5 points extra credit (on a 75-point assignment) to essays submitted on time (Friday).

We watched a short segment of an instructional film from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences featuring a clip from Fast and Furious, and compared that with the Odessa Steps sequence in Battleship Potemkin. Then, using a handout concerning montage in that sequence, we began to analyze it in some detail.

HW due Friday:
Single-scene essay analysis. Papers submitted Friday will receive 5 pts. extra credit. Papers submitted Monday will receive full credit.

Wednesday, March 24

Students received a notesheet of vocabulary relating to early Soviet cinema and began filling in the sheet while we continued our discussion of montage in Battleship Potemkin, illustrating the discussion with clips from the film.

Tomorrow: The Odessa Steps.

HW due Friday:
Single-scene analysis essay.

Tuesday, March 23

Using the "Soviet Montage" excerpt by Gerald Mast, we reviewed the concept of film montage as used by Eisenstein and other early Soviet filmmakers, differentiating varieties of narrative, intellectual, and emotional montage.

Monday, March 22

We read together from Eisenstein's essay "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film Today," and saw how Eisenstein and the other Soviet filmmakers of the twenties both learned from and, in their view, surpassed the films of D.W. Griffith in the use of "montage," or film editing.

We then watched the first 25 minutes of The Cutting Edge, a documentary about film editing; this included sections about Griffith and the Russians. Students took notes on the film and turned them in at the end of class.

Friday, March 19

We went over the reading assignment -- excerpts from Eisenstein's "Dickens, Griffith, and the Film of Today" -- and discussed both Eisenstein's ideological contempt for and technical admiration of Griffith's films. Griffith's use of cross-cutting and other film editing devices, derived from the novels of Charles Dickens, were "a revelation" to the early Soviet filmmakers. Those filmmakers took those techniques to a new level, developing a theory and practice of "montage." Students received a further handout on "Soviet Montage" which summarizes those developments, to be read by Monday.

HW due Monday:
Read today's handout (see above) and review Friday's (see below).

HW due next Friday:
Single-scene analysis (outside viewing).

Thursday, March 18

Students wrote paragraphs in response to the follwing two questions:

1. Compare Birth of a Nation and Battleship Potemkin as propaganda.
2. Compare the two films in terms of their film editing techniques.

HW due a week from Friday:
Single-scene analysis essays.

Tuesday, March 16

Rather than discuss Birth of a Nation, we decided to take advantage of the extended period -- and the modest length of our next film -- and watch a movie start to finish for a change, the movie in question being Sergei Eisenstein's early Soviet masterpiece Battleship Potemkin.

HW:
Get going with your outside viewing films; single-scene analysis due a week from Friday.

Monday, March 15

Students borrowed films for their outside viewing papers (due March 26), after which we watched the conclusion of Birth of a Nation. During the final reel students rose to their feet cheering and waving their checklists as the heroic clansmen rode to the rescue to the triumphant strains of Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries, and in the closing seconds of the film all joined their lusty voices in our national anthem: "And say does that star-spangled banner yet wave, o'er the land of the free and the home of the Aryans?"

Or maybe not.

Students turned in their checklists.

Friday, March 15

Students received an assignment sheet for the first Outside Viewing Essay -- due March 26 -- and we went over it together. Films will be distributed on Monday.

We watched a bit more of Birth of a Nation. learning among other things about how the KKK came to wrap themselves in bedsheets.

HW due Friday, March 26
First Outside Viewing Essay.

Thursday, March 11

We began Part Two of Birth of a Nation, "Reconstruction," and saw first hand the carpetbaggers' nefarious plot to make black people the equal of whites -- nay, to destroy civilization and put the white South under the black South's heel.

Wednesday, March 10

Seniors were excused for a class meeting.

Those of us who were left learned about Ub Iwerks and watched the first Mickey Mouse cartoons and Betty Boop and Cab Calloway in "Minnie the Moocher."

Tuesday, March 9

Students checked techniques off their checklists while watched more of Birth, at normal and fast speed, up to the assassination of Lincoln.

Monday, March 8

Students took a 15-question quiz over the handouts about the Reconstruction period and Birth of a Nation, and we went over the answers together.

In the little time remaining we watched a few more minutes of the film.

Friday, March 5

Students received a checklist of important pioneering techniques in Birth of a Nation, which they began to fill in as we watched a bit more of the film.

HW due Monday:
Read the four previous handouts (on Reconstruction and Birth) and prepare for a quiz over them.

Thursday, March 4

Mr. P announced that there will be a quiz over Wednesday's four handouts on Monday.

We watched several more sections of the Reconstruction documentary, then began watching Birth of a Nation (we only just began).

HW due Monday:
Read the four handouts and prepare for a quiz over them.

Wednesday, March 3

Students received four handouts, one on the history of Reconstruction after the American Civil War and one on Birth of a Nation.

We will entertain two opposing views of Reconstruction. Today we began with the commie abolitionist line in the form of excerpts from a PBS documentary on the period. This will be followed by D.W. Griffith's authentic account in his famous film.

HW due Thursday:
Start reading the handouts; be sure to finish the first (Howard Zinn's account of Reconstruction) by Thursday.

Tuesday, March 2

We finished our examination of visual motifs in Shadow of a Doubt, looking again at several key scenes involving stairs and the inseparably related use of low- and high-camera angles.

Monday, March 1

We returned to our analysis of motifs in Shadow of a Doubt, revisiting several scenes.